Ribosome mediated translation involves hybridising the anti-codon of tRNAs to a mRNA template and generating a bond between the amino acid residues harboured by the tRNAs. Only 2 reactive groups are reacted in order to generate the peptide bond between neighbouring amino acid residues in the growing peptide chain. Ribosome mediated translation employs the principle of template directed synthesis and does not involve hybridization of a plurality of connector polynucleotides (CPNs) to a plurality of complementary connector polynucleotides (CCPNs). Another difference between ribosome mediated translation and the method of the present invention is that in the present method for synthesising at least one molecule, at least 1 CCPN hybridizes to at least 2 CPNs.
Additional examples of template directed synthesis methods are disclosed in WO 93/03172 (Gold et al.) and WO 02/074929 (Liu et al.). The methods of the present invention are not related to template directed synthesis as no templates are employed in the methods of the present invention.
Enzymatic ligation and chemical ligation are processes well known in the art. In some cases only 2 reactive groups react in order to generate a product. An example is a reaction between e.g. a 5′-phosphate group of a nucleotide and a 3′-hydroxy group of another nucleotide.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the synthesis and formation of a molecule in accordance with the methods of the present invention does not result in polynucleotides being covalently linked once the molecule has been formed. Rather, the plurality of CCPNs having donated functional entities to the synthesis of the molecule comprising reacted reactants, such as e.g. covalently linked functional entities, remain hybridised to one or more CPNs and do not become covalently linked once the molecule comprising covalently linked functional entities has been generated.